05 February 2019

More than six in 10 organisations believe that the actual costs of maintaining cloud technologies are higher than they expected, according to research by SoftwareONE.

In an independently conducted survey, the software and cloud portfolio management polled 250 IT and business decision-makers from a variety of UK organisations with at least 500 employees. Respondents were taken from a wide variety of different organisations including IT, tech and telecoms, retail, distribution and transport, finance, public sector, among others.

Sixty-two per cent of respondents said that the price of keeping resources in the cloud was greater than anticipated. SoftwareONE says this suggests that despite the benefits cloud brings, businesses can run into difficulties if they do not have the technology, licensing agreements and ongoing monitoring procedures in place to effectively manage and optimise cloud-based software and applications within their wider IT estate.

The study also found that 36 per cent of businesses feel that XaaS offerings have increased in complexity over the past two years, with an additional 33 per cent believing that the level of complexity has remained unchanged in this time.

When viewed alongside the unexpected management costs associated with the cloud, SoftwareONE reckons it becomes clear that cloud deployments are “fraught” with challenges if businesses do not have the means to administer the various elements of their implementations effectively.

Zak Virdi, the company’s UK MD, says: “It’s clear that the rapid growth in cloud services and options – while providing an exceptional level of choice to businesses – is also leading to organisations struggling to fully maximise cloud investments while keeping expenditure as low as possible.”

To illustrate this point further, 44 per cent of those surveyed said budget restraints often push their organisation towards choosing second or third choice technology options, rather than the one they felt was ideal for them. Moreover, 38 per cent said that the management of licences and subscriptions for both cloud deployments and on-premise software pose a “significant degree of complexity”.